Magician Victor Dorobantu plays Thing, the hand from ‘Wednesday’: ‘Some actors say I’m lucky that I’m not so exposed’

At the premiere of the second season of Wednesday, which took place on July 30 in London, the actors who play the Addams Family posed together quite seriously and gothically, without breaking character from their roles on the Netflix series. There stood Jenna Ortega (Wednesday), Catherine Zeta-Jones (Morticia), Luis Guzmán (Gomez), Isaac Ordonez (Pugsley), Fred Armisen (Uncle Fester) and Joanna Lumley (Grandmama Hester Frump, Morticia’s mother). Also making a high-profile appearance was Thing, the faithful severed hand who accompanies the series’ protagonist, and was perched on a purple cushion held aloft by Guzmán, alternating between making a peace sign and giving the finger.

But there was one last person, perhaps more difficult to place: he stood behind the others, wearing a purple shirt, perhaps in an attempt to blend in with the hand raised on the cushion of the same color. That was Victor Dorobantu, the 28-year-old Romanian magician whose real hand brings Thing to life. “Many people think that Thing is CG,” he comments to EL PAÍS on a video call.

But in fact, it is Dorobantu who brings to life one of the most beloved characters in the series, who is also one of the few to appear in every episode. “Thing is my favorite. Thing is a champion” or even “Thing’s final scene made me cry. How can I have so much love for this hand?” are among the comments that appear during a cursory scan of X for audience takes on the famous hand.

However, very few admirers can put a face to the actor who moves its fingers. “It’s not as bad as most people think. Some actors actually say that I’m lucky that I’m not so exposed, so not many people harass me,” Dorobantu says of his ever-dwindling anonymity. “It started in an interview of Tim Burton [director and producer of Wednesday], where he said that Thing was actually played by a human being, and then the press started becoming curious about the story. Now, the producers have started to push me out there and show people who I am. And I am very grateful for that,” he says.

Dorobantu has worked in sales, but as an adolescent, learned some magic tricks that helped him to earn some extra money at weddings, baptisms and communions. His first and only television gig before his leap to international fame was in 2019, via a Romanian talent program, where he performed a magic show. “It was kind of a fail,” he recalls, stifling a laugh. “I went there two times. First time I didn’t get likes from three juries. I only got one like. And then when I went the second time, it was a little bit more. But mostly, everyone thought it was cringe,” he says.

Be that as it may, this televised rejection proved key to him entering the Wednesday universe. “There was also a magician playing the hand in the Addams Family movies. One of them was Christopher Hart, for example. So they decided to have another magician play it,” he recalls.

Filming for the first season took place in Romania, so the producers got in touch with several local agencies in their search for magicians. “That’s when they Googled ‘Romanian magicians,’ from what I heard. And I think they found me because of a video where I made fun of myself on TV,” Dorobantu says.

After they tried out some 30 candidates and selected four to meet with Burton himself, he was chosen. “I don’t think I have a pretty hand, but maybe they saw something else in it,” Dorobantu reflects.

But beauty matters little when it comes to playing Thing, who is characterized by dirty nails and multiple scars. “Every morning on set we spend two hours on makeup. At the end of the day, it’s half an hour to take it off,” says Dorobantu.

To bring the character to life, the Romanian actor dons a blue screen suit that makes it easier for the special effects team to make his body disappear, as he himself has demonstrated on his Instagram and TikTok profiles — where he has added “actor” to his bio line of “magician illusionist and event entertainer.”

It is also on social media where he shares the impossible positions into which he must contort himself, and the curious contraptions into which he must climb to make Thing look realistic. “Everyone thinks that magicians have dexterity, and they do. But I also have to help the set designers build trap doors or hidden places where they can put your body, so that it’s less to edit when they delete my body,” he says of these invisibility tricks.

Even so, he says that magicians “tend to have a very robotic muscle memory,” a further challenge to his goal of transmitting emotions through a hand that runs, jumps, trembles and even dances — but never talks. “We spent one or two months before the shooting, trying to find ways to show anger, to show love. That was a challenge,” he remembers. The process also posed challenges to the rest of the cast. “Everyone had to get used to talking to a hand, which at the beginning was very funny.”

He has a special affinity for Guzmán — “he is like a brother to me, and makes me laugh every time” — and “as a newbie,” cherishes the valuable advice and memories he’s received from the rest of the cast and crew. “Steve Buscemi is one of the funniest people I’ve ever met. Catherine Zeta-Jones is one of the kindest women that you can meet. Jenna is very funny, but most of the time on set, she’s Wednesday 100%, so you can’t see many smiles,” he shares.

He is also fascinated by Tim Burton, with whom he says he identifies. “All the geniuses are mad and crazy. He is the friendly one, like a friendly ghost,” Dorobantu says of the director of Sleepy Hollow and Big Fish, who is known around the world for his fantastic, gothic, dark style. “He is very funny, very creative. He is such a different person on set. When he is there and wants to become creative and is searching for ideas, he is very weird. But everybody loves the weirdness he has,” says Dorobantu.

When Dorobantu got the call to participate in the casting that would change his life, he thought it was a joke. “I [hung up] the phone four times until that lady that called me convinced me to go,” he confesses.

The magician had never left Romania, but thanks to the insistence of that woman, he has now traveled around the world to promote and film the series. The first time he ever got on an airplane was to go to Hollywood for the series premiere. “Season one was shot here in Romania, and the second in Ireland. Now the next one [the show’s third season has already been confirmed], I don’t even know. But I would enjoy filming in other countries as well, maybe Spain,” he says.

Still, he feels comfortable in Romania, and has no plans to move in the near future. He says he liked Los Angeles, but he also values the calm of his home country, where he has more immediate plans: on February 21, he shared with his followers the moment he proposed to his girlfriend, Romanian singer Miruna MayRa, who also accompanies him to every premiere. “SHE SAID YES. Ladies and gents, I present you to my fiancée!” he posted alongside the video of the moment.

For four years, he’s been morphing into Thing — or is it the reverse? — throwing himself to the floor, and soaring into the air to achieve the desired effect. In the second season, the character has become more of a protagonist, showing more depth, just like Dorobantu is in this press tour. “I love this character and I wouldn’t stop doing this, no matter what.”

But make no mistake, that doesn’t mean that he doesn’t have the desire to play other roles for which the rest of his body and his voice make an appearance. “I wish to be maybe in the future a creature performer, like Andy Serkis [who plays Gollum in The Lord of the Rings and the chimpanzee Cesar in Planet of the Apes]. That’s one of my idols. There are so many actors that made the difference in this industry impersonating creatures, that’s one of the things that I would love to do,” says the magician who couldn’t convince television judges, but who thanks to those sloppy tricks, is living the most otherworldly experience of his life.

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